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A little more on Heinlein...
Sep. 7th, 2006 05:32 pmI'm currently in the process of reading Expanded Universe, by Heinlein. I just came across this quote, in his discussion of alternate voting practices:
How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years, they have voted... but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.
Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there, at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.
Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of the law for women.
Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed.
Unconventional? Yes. Sexist? The only definition of sexism that I can see applying to Heinlein is the one that states that sexism is "the belief that one gender is superior to the other." I can see that applying to Heinlein, with the understanding that Heinlein's bias is to think that the female gender is superior to the male.
How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years, they have voted... but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.
Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there, at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.
Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of the law for women.
Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed.
Unconventional? Yes. Sexist? The only definition of sexism that I can see applying to Heinlein is the one that states that sexism is "the belief that one gender is superior to the other." I can see that applying to Heinlein, with the understanding that Heinlein's bias is to think that the female gender is superior to the male.
